


Death Becomes Them

by kay_emm_gee



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 01:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6496063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_emm_gee/pseuds/kay_emm_gee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six friends, six senses, and death. </p><p>{A character study of the pack}</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death Becomes Them

## 

**_i. scott_ **

Death smells like grass dried to brown by the summer sun, melting asphalt, and dog piss. He is used to the last scent, because Roxy used to pee everywhere when they first got her. She didn’t really smell like that though; she smelled musky, and warm, and he loved pressing his face into her furry neck to breathe her in. He can’t remember it too well now though because he just smells blood when he thinks of her, the scent of hot rotting breath from the other dog burning out everything else. And then he smelled nothing, because he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs, his stupid asthmatic lungs. That was the last time he got to smell Roxy, and she didn’t even smell like her anymore.

He crinkles his nose at the scent of formaldehyde rising up from the frogs splayed across their lab benches. It permeates the classroom, so strong that it even overpowers the linoleum cleaner that lingers each morning from from the night before. His teacher prowls by--smelling like chalk and criticism--and he forces himself to look at the long dead animal on his bench, waiting to have its organs dissected. If he wants to be a veterinarian, he has to do this. It isn’t the first dead animal he’s seen, and it won’t be the last. Even so, he holds his breath when he makes the first cut.

The next time he smells death, it isn’t so contained, controlled, exact. It is like you would expect, pungent with decay and rot. He nearly gags on it was he runs from the glowing red eyes following him in the dark forest. The browning leaves wetly disintegrate underneath his sprinting feet, his sneaker soles wrending them into mushy piles. He saw death in that woman’s eyes, the woman with only half a body, smelled it on her as iron and metal. He’ll never think of red or brown in any other way now than the smell of blood caked in her dirty brunette hair.

Allison smells like she always has: wax, flowers, leather. He holds her, and she smells the same, like the girl who could kill him with a single release of her bow but instead did it with a smile. Her smile always got him from the first: small, shy, but sure. She was the one thing he never had to worry about, because she who protects everyone else can certainly protect herself. Except now she smells like wax, and flowers, and leather, and _blood, so much blood._ She smiles at him one more time, and he feels like he’s dying, but it is her who slips away instead.

Dust--the only scent he can pick up is dust. It coats the books, swirling in the air, catching the light of the moon looming large outside the library. After the sting of Liam’s claws, he can feel the wetness spreading across his shirt, and he knows too much blood is pouring from his chest. With that much seeping out, he should be able to smell it, but he can’t. He just smells dust. _Ashes to ashes, dust to dust._ He is dying, and he is dust.

* * *

 

**_ii. malia_ **

Death tastes tangy, salty, metallic. It is warm on her lips, which are curling over her teeth--fangs, really. Her long pink tongue licks the blood off, blood of the mother and sister she used to have. A scream--animalistic, grieving, a howl into the night--rips from her, but the bodies in the car don’t move. She wiggles out of the wrecked vehicle and runs, sprinting through the woods, and it isn’t until later she realizes there is a cut in her side. Whimpering, she licks at it, tasting iron and salt again. She’ll have to get used to it, she supposes. She’s on her own now.

Rabbits taste more like earth and sweat and leaves than she would have expected. The fur gets stuck in her teeth, coating her tongue thickly. She hacks it up, stomach squeezing nauseously. The meat on the bones doesn’t taste any better, and she washes the gamey flavor down by snapping on the bones. Marrow tastes like nothing, and that is the best way to wash down her new reality: she is a killer, but it is to survive, so she keeps doing it. She wants to live, after all.

She gags as she bites into the sandwich that her father made for her. She used to love peanut butter and jelly, but it is too much now. The salty-sweet almost burns her tongue, too strong and preserved. It sticks everywhere in her mouth, sealing and sucking and weighing her tongue down. Sugar from the grape jelly coats her teeth like a film, and her lips part as she tries to bring moisture back into her mouth. Gulping down water from the glass, she nearly chokes again when she sees her dad’s disappointed stare, the hope of getting his little girl back dying in his eyes. Then his expression smooths over though, he stands, and gets her another glass of water. He’s trying, and so she throws him a weak smile and stuffs another cloying bite of sandwich down.

Flavors get easier to deal with, and Stiles is right when he says her favorite food is pizza. And the place his dad takes her for dinner, just the two of them, has the best. It’s salty and savory and the sauce is a little spicy. Their meat-lovers has at least five different types on it. She can’t even name them all, not yet, but they taste incredible. Grease smears cover her face, and she licks her lips in a way that most people would find crass. The sheriff just laughs and hands her another piece. She bites in deep, waiting for the tingle from the spices to bite her lips. She needs it more than she can say, washing out the taste of grit and dirt and grime from the tunnels where Scott almost died, and Kira almost died. Where Peter almost died. She licks sauce from her fingers, determined to taste anything other than death tonight.

She already lost one mother, and now as her tongue flicks over her split lips, the tangy flavor of blood floods her mouth while she watches the loss of another. Except she never really had this mother, not really. The desert wolf can’t ever be had; she only takes, steals, amasses. She is never the one someone else possesses. More blood spurts up, in the back of her mouth, because her organs aren’t quite recovering from the bullet wound as fast as they should. Still, when her mother’s eyes flash blue--it isn’t fair they look so much like hers--she manages to swallow down the taste of iron and bare her fangs to growl in return, letting go of the one thing she ever really wanted (love or revenge, it is one of those two, it is one of those two terrible things).

* * *

 

**_iii. stiles_ **

Death looks like water swirling down white porcelain, faded orange scales glinting in the bathroom light, and painted fingernails reaching up to wipe away his tears. Roscoe wasn’t the most active goldfish, but he was never listless, until he was. Then he was belly up, floating at the top of the tank. Now he is gone, flushed away. He can’t watch him swim back and forth anymore, tracing his progress with his finger across the glass. He can’t talk to him, tell him about the funny thing Scott said, about how it was stupid he wasn’t allowed to ride his bike down the street without his dad to supervise. He sniffs into his mother’s shoulder, hating how he is looking at her green shirt instead of Roscoe’s orange fins.

It should be raining. He should be watching water drops plop into the fresh dirt on his mother’s grave. Instead, the sun shines brightly, warmly, making that same dirt glimmer. He kicks a pebble angrily towards the mound, and it sinks in, almost disappearing. Staring at his unscuffed dress shoes, newly bought for the funeral, he feels hot tears well up in his eyes, blurring the grass and the dirt and his new shoes. The shoes too clean, and he wants to scratch them up, rub mud into their too shiny surface. He doesn’t want to see his warped reflection in them, with his dad over his shoulder but not his mom. All he can see of her anymore is her name carved into the headstone at the top of her grave, and it makes him want to scream.

She is all tangles: tangled rope, tangled hair, tangled guts. Dirty and bloody and only half a body but a full mess. Cloudy, unseeing eyes stare up at him accusingly, pleadingly, ghastly. That image will haunt his dreams for years to come, the way her fingers dig into the dirt. He knows she is dead and that she can’t move, but those fingers--they still look like they’re trying to claw their way up, out of the hole, back into life. A few purple petals fall onto her, and he half expects her to turn into a wolf again. She doesn’t move though, still staring, still dead.

Then suddenly death is everywhere he looks, and following it is red hair falling over floral patterns. First comes the bodies--he sees them bitten, bloody, twisted, drowned--and then comes her, scared and snappish and sinking under the weight of something neither of them understand. As the death toll multiples, he blinks and rubs his eyes, hoping he is simply seeing double, triple. There can’t be this many lives taken away, this many bones buried too soon. He hopes it is his vision betraying him, otherwise there are threes and threes of bodies popping up everywhere, until it is three people they all love who might be next. They aren’t, though, and he never wants to see the space where his father was supposed to be but wasn’t again, so he starts looking harder, broader, _more_. He looks and looks and looks at red strings spun and strung over black-and-white clippings. Watching--he is always watching now.

Bodies need graves, and graves are just cold, damp holes in the ground. He has stared at enough of them since he was young to know what they look like. Suddenly they start blooming across his vision in the oddest places. A gaping hole appears in Donovan’s chest, blood-black in the darkness of the library. The beam put that hole there; _he_ put that hole there. Standing across from Scott in the rain, they must only be a few feet away, but when he looks down, he sees a chasm, a gaping rip in the ground between him and his best friend. A small, bloody one appears on the side of Lydia’s head, oozing and leaking and seemingly growing larger the longer he stares at it. The holes grow and contract and expand and shrink, dark sucking empty spaces threatening to swallow them all whole and bury them not alive, but dead.

* * *

 

**_iv. lydia_ **

Death sounds like thump or a thud, she can’t really tell which. After comes the fluttering, then no fluttering. When she peers through the window and sees the still little bird on the ground, she cries out. It takes no more than a minute for her to race outside, cradling the dead animal in her hand. She wants to hear it sing, and chirp, and twitter, but instead only her own whines fill the morning air. The bird is still warm in her hand when her mother gasps and takes it from her. Cries continue to pour from her mouth when her mother pulls her in, stroking her head and shushing her soothingly. Her hair rustles under her mother’s gentle touch, her reassuring voice drowning out everything else eventually. Then a bird trills in the distance, and her tears start again.

Her mother’s voice isn’t nearly so soft when she scolds (angrily, fearfully, shortly): _I told you to stay in the car!_ Maybe she should have; then maybe she wouldn’t be seeing her grandmother in the bathtub, arms splayed limply and covered in blood. Except she couldn’t stand sitting in the car, not with the _drip, drip, drip_ echoing in her ears. It was annoying, and persistent, a little whisper calling for her to leave and find the source of the ever-growing noise. _Drip (open the car door). Drip (step outside). Drip (walk down the hall). Drip (go in the room)._ So now she is staring at her grandmother, covered in blood, not as shocked as she should be. She heard the blood after all ( _drip. drip. drip._ ) before she ever saw it.

She hears the whispers more after that, but then comes hormones and puberty and short skirts and the thrill of having boys watch her walk down the hallway. Other whispers, ones from jealous and awed classmates alike, drown out the first type. Those come to her in the darkest hour of the night and press so closely to her skin like a sticky, humid film that she wakes up in a panic. So she listens to the shallow murmurings instead and wears her red lipstick like warpaint. Because if it isn’t warpaint, it looks too much like _drip, drip, drip._ She doesn’t want to hear that again, ever. Instead, she listens to wagging tongues and rustling skirts and cheers that rise up from the benches on the lacrosse field. She hears lockers slam and books rustle and music blast from speakers at the party of the year-- _her_ party. It is deafening, almost numbing, but she doesn’t mind, because it’s better than the alternative.

But then those haunting whispers become screams, too loud for her to drown out any longer. They ring in her head, and the putrid, hot breath that accompanies their cries builds up inside her skull. The voices scream, and the pressure builds in her head until it is too much, and she joins them. She never understood the pack mentality--the urge to howl because you heard another do the same--until now. She screams right along with them, blowing out lights and glass and maybe her own sanity. The whine of police sirens eventually drowns her out, but her ears are left ringing, even when she goes home and pulls out the cough syrup. It glugs slowly into the little cup, until she tips the bottle back, the last of it _drip, drip, dripping_ out. She gags as she swallows it, but it soothes her sore throat--ripped raw from screeches and sobs--regardless.

Worse than the whispers or dripping, though, is being able to hear the death of her loved ones coming. The whir of a silver-tipped arrow and Allison’s triumphant gasp drowned out by the swish of a sword and the sucking sound of a fatal stomach wound. Aiden’s roar overpowered by the rattle of Berserker bones, followed by the burbling of blood over lips she had kissed and bitten and caressed. Those weren’t her fault, she knows this, even if she cries angry tears into her pillows because _if only she had more control, if only she had sensed it sooner._ When she hears eardrums pop, though, bursting like gunshots as she screams, her gut twists because that is her doing. It may not be her fault--that she lays at Dr. Valack’s feet--but it is her doing. Her screams still come, though, loud and piercing and the strongest thing she’s ever heard.

* * *

 

**_v. kira_ **

Death feels like an itchy collar of a black dress and pinched toes from buckle-shoes that haven’t been broken in yet. The clothes are uncomfortable, but even more so is how everyone she looks at is sobbing, mournful, tearful. She should be feeling wetness rolling down her cheeks too. It is a funeral, after all. Her eyes stay dry though, because she didn’t even really know the woman in the coffin--a great aunt, or great cousin, somebody whom she’d met when she was little but didn’t remember. So when her mother comes over, she buries her face in her slippery silk-covered shoulder, not to cry, but to hide the fact that she isn’t shedding tears.

Earlier, the ropes pulled taut against her chest and wrists were painful, constricting her struggles to get free from Barrow. She can’t feel their bite now; too many other pains tug at her instead because Scott is writhing on the floor ( _she’s not the one you want!_ ) and her kidnapper is drawing closer with the sparking wires. The air around her face crackles, sending ticklish waves across her skin. Something hums through her muscles, and her hair raises on end as those bright white sparks draw closer. Maybe this is the end for her, going out in a spectacular blitz of light. The tickles turn to prickles that are oddly invigorating, and the hum turns to a bone-deep vibration, and the light explodes. Her skin feels warm, warmer, hot, like she’s burning alive--her heart seizes from the electricity, suddenly too big for her chest, but it keeps beating. She can feel the _bum-bum_ of it against her ribcage, and she feels alive, so very alive, fingers collecting sparks as she looks over and sees Barrow lying dead on the concrete.

The hilt is surprisingly thin under her fingers, like if she squeezes too hard it will crumble beneath her grip. When she does tighten her hand around it though, she can feel the hardness of the metal, the strength of the katana. Her fingertips start to tingle, and that tingle zips up her to knuckles. Immediately she loosens her hold, thinking it’s numbness. The sensation just grows stronger, a prickling, buzzing feeling that shoots up her arm. Warm and unsettling, it shocks her, and she swishes the sword through the air, brutal and forceful, trying to shake it off. Once she’s moving, though, she can’t stop. She can feel the lightning running through her, running through the katana; she can feel how easily that blade could stick into flesh, how easily the storm inside her could bring destruction. With a grim smile, she grips the hilt tighter because if death is coming for her friends, then she is going to deal it out too.

Warm--Scott always felt warm to her. It is no different this time, him lying on the bed and his shirt half open. Her pulse spikes (not for good reasons, happy reasons) as Liam rants and her mother speaks in warning tones. She can feel the tension in the air, the danger. Yet, she still puts her hand on Scott’s chest. His warm chest, the chest that holds his beating heart, the heart that’s sometimes too big for his body, for his own good. He is warm, in body and spirit, but she stills lays a hand on him, letting her thunder and lightning race from her own storm-ridden heart, down her arm, through his chest, and into his heart. His heart, which beats uncontrollably when the electricity hits it, fighting to stay alive. It-- _she_ \--is too strong though, and with a violent rise and fall of his chest under her hand, his heart stops beating. In that moment, it feels like her own does too.

Electricity and metal are her constants, the things that made her feel strong when the ground shifts under her feet like quicksand. So when they’re in danger, in the middle of the club with flashing lights and foes who look like friends, she turns to those things. She feels the lightning thrum through her muscle and sinew, feels the katana under her calloused palm; she lets the fox take over, and it feels _good._ Nothing could be stronger than sparks and steel, and so with a cry, she swings to kill, but then--Scott grabs her wrist. He looks at her; she blinks at him. She feels the pull of the fox on her soul but also the firm, kind pressure of his hand. She blinks again; she feels human again. She feels the power slip away, and her chest aches fiercely, missing it, but her heart swells when she sees the frightened boy--he’s just a boy, just someone like them--still alive beneath her.

* * *

 

**_+i. allison_ **

Death is a girl who lives beyond the veil, hiding in the grey shadows draped around her like a mourning shroud. Watching, patient, melancholy--a bow in her hand and a quiver at her back, taunt and sharp but rarely used. She is a guide, a protector to keep the souls from falling into the darkness.

_We protect those who cannot protect themselves._

She cannot protect her friends from death forever, but she can try, and when they do finally come to her--hopefully not too soon--she will greet them with tears and a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! Kudos & comments are much appreciated :)


End file.
